Exhibitions
Alison Turnbull: Houses into Flats
This exhibition by British artist Alison Turnbull (b.1956), comprised a series of twenty-eight paintings made over the preceding three years. Inspired by architectural plans, sections and elevations, the paintings featured diagrams of public and domestic buildings floating freely against coloured fields. The buildings, most of which Turnbull had never seen, were sourced from an eclectic range of books, maps and the internet. Through her technique of layering and repeatedly abrading the surfaces of her paintings, Turnbull subjected each architectural blueprint to a kind of archaeology. Subjects included a town hall, chapel, villa, apartment, lighthouse, factory, bank, and asylum. Turnbull likened the series to building an imaginary town or evoking the activities and rituals that make up a life. Alison Turnbull's wall work Moon is one of the site-specific commissions that was made for Milton Keynes Theatre Foyer, immediately next door to Milton Keynes Gallery, funded during the construction of the building by the Percent for Art scheme.
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Layla Curtis
Layla Curtis might be likened to a cartographer, but her maps are painstakingly produced and more a commentary on mapping than useful depictions of locations. For the exhibition at MK G she will be making use of sea, road and various world topographical maps, collaged into intriguing hybrid pieces. Some of them are specifically influenced by the grid format of Milton Keynes, one of them turning MK into a rectangular island surrounded by the sea. Another new work is a framed text piece, Index (Everywhere I’ve ever been), presented like a hoax index to an atlas, incorporating only the places Curtis has been to in her lifetime. Curtis recently said of her work: ‘Travelling has always been an integral part of my life. Like most people I rely on and trust maps to find my way, locate myself and plan journeys. By dissecting, dismembering and collaging maps to create new, hybrid maps, I aim to explore the effects of disturbing this trusted system of mapping.’ (Interview with Mike Dawson, Flux magazine, April 2000). With the world political map in constant flux, Curtis’s work invites us to consider such issues as disputed borders, international relations, unions, conflicts, internationalisation and globalisation.
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Richard Wright
For his solo show in MK Gallery's Cube Gallery, Richard Wright (b.1960) made a specifically commissioned wall drawing. The drawing referenced seating in the adjacent MK Theatre, which opened at the same time as MK Gallery in October 1999, Wright's drawing process falls between action painting and site-specific installation. His approach is meticulous and usually of a symmetrical design but the final drawing results from what happens in situ; its execution becomes a live event. Though hand made, his flat emblematic images look mechanically produced. The use of gouache brings areas of intense colour that look as if they have been printed onto the gallery wall. Wright tends to use simple geometric forms that focus on the connections between art, design and architecture. The style of popular culture is interspersed with emblematic forms that are linked to modernist paintings and also graphic designs like tattoos and corporate logos. This blending of imagery is integrated with the physical architecture to create a temporary work of art that will remain only as a visual memory for the viewer.
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Conversation: An Exhibition of Figurative Sculpture
Conversation is an intriguing exhibition of twenty-two figurative sculptures in a variety of media, mostly by well-known British contemporary artists, such as Tony Cragg, John Davies, Antony Gormley, Julian Opie and Marc Quinn, but it also includes some unexpected pieces, such as a 3rd century BC painted terracotta figure and a 20th century wooden Lobi Shrine Figure from Ghana. Selected by the Gallery's Director Stephen Snoddy, the sculptures will be displayed in such a way as to invite visitors to see how the works might ‘speak’ to each other, and consider how to interpret the ‘conversations’ established between them. The arrangement or configuration of the sculptures is, therefore, just as important as the individual works, with the exhibition acting as one large tableau. In what might be termed a game of ‘musical statues’, the sculptures will change positions at least once during the exhibition, to allow different conversations or readings to be found between the works. The gallery’s free guided tours on Wednesdays and Sundays will be used to invite visitors to engage with the displays, by encouraging them to identify these possible ‘conversations’ for themselves. The exhibition offers visitors the chance to see a selection of figurative sculpture by some of the country’s best-known contemporary artists. It contributes to the discussion on the continuing development of figurative sculpture and offers the opportunity to consider such themes as private communication and human exchange, silence and darkness, life and death, the inner self and the outside reality. There is no catalogue for the exhibition but each work will be accompanied by an extended wall text.
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Richard Ross: Gathering Light
Richard Ross (b.1947) has assembled a collection of large format colour photographs over a number of years, while travelling on assignments for magazines. In capturing these remarkable locations on film, the American photographer demonstrates an expert understanding of the camera, which makes tangible the very essence of the visual. Gathering Light includes carefully staged scenes of interiors with a backdrop of various faiths and cultures. Tombs, churches and temples provide an atmospheric ground for his studies, portraying the situation as if it were a stage set. The lighting found within these situations becomes the focus of the work as the luminosity emerging in these images comes from the coincidence of light and dark. MK G presents fourteen photographs selected from this touring exhibition, which was initiated by the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
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Jan Dibbets: Ten Cupolas
Jan Dibbets (b.1941) presents ten images of cupolas, all upward interior views of domes taken over a period of thirteen years, beginning in 1983 with his photograph of the Four Courts in Dublin and ending with his 1995 view of the observatory in Paris. They are united not only by a common theme but also a philosophy in which the artist questions our perception of light and distance as well as presenting us with images of great subtlety.
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John Riddy: Recent Work
John Riddy (b.1959 in Northampton) presents images which place architecture and inhabited space within the photograph as a sequence of echoes and reflections. Though appearing nostalgic, the photographs have a sense of clarity, which makes formal the complexity of perspective and texture. His understanding of the relationship between place and image is exhibited in his particular use of framing within the camera lens, increasing the severity of the subject by playing on the perspective of surfaces, gravity, balance and light. Not simply documents of places, they also explore the poetic and continuing possibility of private reflection. For this exhibition at MK Gallery John Riddy selected ten recent works, which included views of Rome, Valencia, Whipsnade and London. In contrast to the Richard Ross and Jan Dibbets exhibitions which were showing in adjacent rooms at MK Gallery, and featured interior views, the works selected by Riddy were all exterior subjects.
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FaceOn
The works in FaceOn examine the relationship artists have with the subjects they represent through various strategies which give visibility to others, (often the displaced or dispossessed), and insist on us, the viewers, looking into the eyes and faces of these subjects. The selected artists are: Jennifer Bornstein, Roderick Buchanan, Adam Chodzko, Alfredo Jaar, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Philip Lorca DiCorcia. Visitors to MK Gallery will be met with video and installation works, staged colour photographic tableaux, performance documentation film, and photographic work which has the initial appearance of family portraiture. Each image in the exhibition shows the subject to be consciously looking out to the audience or documents a direct contact between artist and subject. Philip Lorca DiCorcia's portraits of male prostitutes, drifters and drug addicts, all taken in a glowing early evening light along Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood are titled with the persons details and fee: Brent Booth: 21 Years Old, Des Moines, Iowa: $30. New York artist Jennifer Bornstein makes her work as an interloper. She approaches strangers and pretends a familial or physical bond, inviting them to have their photograph taken with her as if a family snapshot. Roderick Buchanan's work Me and My Neighbours also introduces the artists’ presence into a family portrait and 'positions cultural differences between photographer and subjects as desirable if not inevitable' (Craig Richardson). Mierle Laderman Ukeles countered the derogatory treatment of New York bin men by photographing herself shaking hands with 8500 'sanitation workers'. These images recall politicians’ 'flesh-pressing' rituals. Alfredo Jaar 'resists the ephemerality of our encounter with refugee images' in the mass media by photographing One Hundred Times Nguyen, repetitions of the portrait of Nguyen Thi Thuy, a Vietnamese asylum seeker in Hong Kong, with slight differences which form acompassionate narrative. Adam Chodzko brings together uncredited extras from Ken Russell's film The Devils who address the camera and recount their experiences as extras while the film plays behind them, uniting the now middle-aged figures with their orgiastic film past. This exhibition was originated by Site Gallery, Sheffield and has been co-curated by Mark Durden and Craig Richardson.
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Mark Wallinger: Cave
Mark Wallinger has been developing significant interest in his work since coming to prominence in the mid 1980s, exhibiting at both national and international levels. His public sculpture Ecce Homo in Trafalgar Square, London, received considerable acclaim and he has been selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale exhibition in 2001. One of Britain’s most respected contemporary artists, Wallinger has worked across diverse media and is using video as part of his exploration of identity, class and religion. Cave provides British audiences with a timely opportunity to experience the artists’ work. Cave is a new large-scale video installation that displays Wallingers’ hallmark style of an unedited single take with the minimum of manipulation. Wallinger’s reference to sport features significantly in his work. Football and horseracingare used to exaggerate the social divisions of race, class and religion. The artist combines his interest as a fan with critical observation fuelling a personal and passionate interest. Cave develops Wallinger’s use of sport as subject by changing the context in which spectator and viewer interact. The boxing ring is the arena recreated in the gallery space in the form of a large four-screen video installation in which two boxers fight a round at quarter the normal speed. As the three minutes stretch to twelve, it is the clarity of the space itself that comes to impress us. The individual shouts and group encouragement from the audience become animalistic howls as the fight replays in slow motion. Drawing on all the noise and feeling surging in the arena, with its particular sound and imagery, Cave explicitly magnifies the conflicting emotions aroused by the sport, from the collision of desire and disappointment to the coexistence of anticipation and revulsion.
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Marta Marcé: New Work
Marta Marcé’s was born Vilafranca, Barcelona, in 1972 she studied in Barcelona and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2000. She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2000. Marcé literally transposes the basic structure of board games and computergames as a starting point for her brightly coloured abstract paintings. She setsclear rules for each one of her paintings. She follows these rules until thegame terminates, which is when she has decided that the painting is finished.Though she is governed by strict criteria, the resulting works are not totally conceptual. The rules set by Marcé allow chance to intervene. She manipulates the unexpected in her paintings by using dice and personal decisions to question the rules as the painting progresses. Marcé´s paintings envelop the idea of expanding the different options of a basic grid as well as enriching it with chance and colour. The grid and concept of leaving things to chance mirrors the realities of Marcé’s life. Marcé's paintings display clearly the set of rules that intervened on its making, and the exact places where those rules were broken. Marcé uses different types of paint and experiments with colour and texture inspired by colours found in her everyday life. Her paintings thus speak about process, freedom and beauty. She is currently working as an artist in residence as part of the Picker Fellowship at Kingston University 2000-2001.
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Abigail Lane: Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated)
For her exhibition Tomorrow's World, Yesterday's Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) British artist Abigail Lane presented a trilogy of theatrical video installations comprising The Figment, The Inclination and The Inspirator. Each looped film projection was set within a sculptural environment in each of MK Gallery's three rooms. These arresting installations extended Lane's preoccupation with the fantastical, the Gothic and the Uncanny and her exploration of the journey from the material to the imaginary world. Two of the three pieces featured were developments of work previously shown in Europe and the United States in other configurations; the third was made specifically for this exhibition in Milton Keynes. For more information about each work please download the press release (right). Artist Information Abigail Lane was born in Penzance in 1967. She emerged during the early 1990s as one of the young British artists (YBAs). With fellow Goldsmiths College London students such as Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas she co-organised the renowned Freeze exhibition of 1988 to show-case their own work. She has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA, where her enigmatic installations have brought her much attention and critical praise. Tomorrow's World, Yesterday's Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) was a Milton Keynes Gallery / Film and Video Umbrella collaboration. It was subsequently shown at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, from October – November 2001.
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Andy Warhol: Cars
The Andy Warhol Cars exhibition, sponsored by Mercedes-Benz, opens at Milton Keynes Gallery on Saturday 8 September. The 28 works, comprising 17 silkscreens and 11 drawings of Mercedes-Benz cars date from 1986 and 1987. The exhibition is on loan for two weeks from the DaimlerChrysler Collection in Germany and this is the first time they have been shown in the UK. Cars was Warhol’s last cycle of paintings, remaining incomplete at the time of his death in 1987. Commissioned by Mercedes-Benz in the mid-1980s to celebrate their centenary, the series was to have included 20 different Mercedes models, chosen to document the history of the car. Of the 80 pictures planned, only 36 paintings and 13 drawings featuring 8 different models were finished, and 28 of these will be shown at MK G. The subjects include the earliest three-wheeler Benz of 1886, a Mercedes Touring Car from the 1920s, a classic 1937 racing car, coupes and Formula 1 cars from the 1950s, and finally an experimental Mercedes-Benz from 1970. The resulting canvases of stylishly contoured cars in glowing colours are both sensual and seductive.
